HOUSTON – Dan Morgan says he isn’t any different than his Panthers teammates. He isn’t fazed by point spreads, by yawning football fans, by experts who already have declared his team an afterthought. The Panthers aren’t bothered by lack of respect, lack of props, lack of credit, lack of national recognition.

“We’re here and there’s a lot of folks who aren’t,” the third-year linebacker said yesterday. “We don’t have to apologize to anyone for being here. Why should we feel like we’re afterthoughts here?”

But, then, Morgan’s pathway to Super Bowl XXXVIII has been a little – shall we say – different than most of his teammates. How different? Let’s start when Dan was nine years old, and his father, Dan Sr., took a peek out the kitchen window of the family’s South Philadelphia apartment. What he saw made him ill: His son was playing football with a couple of neighborhood kids, and he was getting pushed around.

A few minutes later, the boy returned to the apartment, his eyes glued to the floor. His father was waiting for him. “I saw that,” Big Dan told Little Dan. “What the heck is that? Get your butt back out there.”

Sixteen years later, Little Dan isn’t so little anymore, having grown into a 6-2, 245-pound block of football granite. But the mention of that old story still brings a smile to his face.

“The point,” Little Dan says, “was you’d better go out and defend yourself. Unless you want to get out and get beat up every day, you’d better prove you won’t put up with that. And I never did. It was a good lesson.”

A few years later, the Morgan family moved to south Florida, where Little Dan’s old man wound up with one of the coolest jobs imaginable: for seven years, he was a chauffeur and body guard for Dan Marino, local demigod. Big Dan drove Marino around town. Little Dan drank up what life in the NFL was about.

“It was a life,” he said, “that I wanted for myself in the worst way.”

And so it is that Morgan will help anchor the Panthers’ defense Sunday, one of the few things that give Carolina fans hope.

“You don’t get to the Super Bowl on a free pass,” Morgan said. “Anyone who gets this far deserves to be here.”